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CWmike writes "First it was China's 'big hole' sighting that brought us the supercomputing race. Now China is building a city-sized cloud computing and office complex that will include a mega data center, one of the projects fueling that country's double-digit growth in IT spending. The entire complex will cover some 6.2 million square feet, with the initial data center space accounting for approximately 646,000 square feet, says IBM, which is collaborating with a Chinese company to build it. A Sputnik moment? Patrick Thibodeau reports that these big projects, whether supercomputers or sprawling software development office parks, can garner a lot of attention. But China's overall level of IT spending, while growing rapidly, is only one-fifth that of the US."

Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and the government can then threaten to cut me off from said data unless I pay them a bribe! I can get all this for slightly less than I'm paying now! I'd be a fool not to!

You forgot the regular bribe to the party official in charge of the facility so he does not sell access to your data to your competitor as well as bribes for everyone and everything under him for this same reason.

It is quite funny when people call China communist. It is capitalism taken to the ultimate limit where anything and everything is for sale with very few of the moral restrictions which the West has inherited from the 20 centuries of its "Sunday school" upbringing.

It's not a bribe. Consider it a "facilitation fee." My father worked for a company that was looking to win a big contract in Southeast Asia. It is illegal for US companies to pay bribes abroad. So they hired a local "consultant" to help them win the contract. He got paid $1 million for his "services." What he did with the money, was his business. The company won the contract. How much of the money stayed in the "consultant's" pocket, and how much landed in the pockets of other folks, nobody wanted t

The morals and the law code of western society is distinctly Christian till this day (with some medieval legal code thrown into the mix). A lot of dos and don'ts in Western culture originate from Christian religion and societies which have developed in a different religious context have a very different set of dos and don'ts. We may find some of their dos and don'ts abhorent, others disgusting. They do not. Similarly they do not understand some of our obsessio

"Q: How can you tell when it is a real Sputnik moment?
A: Because everyone knows it without being told"

China building a datacenter is not really that exciting. They have a lot of net users, I would expect them to need a lot of infrastructure. What's next, 'China has more miles of paved roads than the US, it is a Sputnik moment for the paving industry.' I doubt it.

The best Obammy can muster these days is to conjure up images from their glory days to try to keep his sheep from realizing that their empire is crumbling around them.

It seems your incurable fear and loathing of an elected leader who doesn't look like you has severely impeded any possibility of higher level sentient reasoning or logic, or your simply dumb as a box of rocks. So I'll help you out here with your mental deficiency.

Sounds to me like he had a solution (even if you don't like it and don't have a solution of your own) and I see that he also didn't mention race (unlike you.) Maybe if you weren't such a racist, arrogant jackass with no solutions, you'd have noticed that. Who's the troll now?

At that point it is obvious where the issue lies for the coward. I don't see your logic in calling me a racist for pointing out that the root of the cowards rant is race based.

"give teachers' unions the boot"

You are correct, he proposed a solution, remove teachers bargaining power for wages and benefits because, you know, they're making too much and have it too easy, or perhaps its the tenure issue, he sees the union as a barrier to firing all the teachers because there are more

Except for the fact that they still own the physical hardware, a lot of papers have been published that pretty much state that it's actually not very difficult to get the encryption keys to a running system if you have control of the hardware. So yeah, encryption isn't nearly as useful in this situation as you would think.

Depends really on how you're handling the encryption. If the encrypted data at all times is stored in an encrypted state on site and a remote computer only ever requests encrypted parts of the data, only decrypting and handling it locally, it suddenly becomes a whole lot harder for the owner of the datacenter to fuck you over.

Sure, if you're just doing a l33t SSH tunnel to a linux based remote system, log into and decrypt your protected home folder, then you're pretty much decrypting it for those who has ac

If you encrypted properly with, say, a one time pad, then no amount of brute forcing will ever help them. It cannot be broken. Of course you would have to keep your several megabyte/gigabyte key somewhere safe if you every want to see your data again.

Nope. Especially if you you use a one time pad, the government will never, ever be able to decrypt your data. What they can do, however, is seize your computer equipment and get the key from there, since I doubt anyone is going to be carrying around a multi-megabyte sequence of numbers in their heads.

Why do you think that this new cloud system has anything to do with you, or that they would try to appeal to you? Chinese networks and Chinese websites rarely have English equivalents, or attempt to provide them. It seems a bit self-centered and presumptuous to think that this "cloud" is an overblown trap aimed squarely at you. We don't even know if its services will be open to the Chinese public, much less foreigners.

For me, it would be a matter of trust. Today's business people do not care about that -- just the short-term bottom line. We will need to see more egregious acts by the Chinese government before anyone will sit up and take notice. And I predict there will be and the victims will be the customers of the business that trusts China with too much data. The decision makers will get away with it as they always have until there is a law which

Anyone entertaining cloud computing without having some way of doing end-to-end encryption AND having a way to guarantee you have physical control over your backups is putting a huge amount of trust in their provider, regardless of who it is.

Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and the government can then threaten to cut me off from said data unless I pay them a bribe! I can get all this for slightly less than I'm paying now! I'd be a fool not to!

Do you seriously think that other data centers in China are not directly accessible by the government?

Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and the government can then threaten to cut me off from said data unless I pay them a bribe! I can get all this for slightly less than I'm paying now! I'd be a fool not to!

Did anybody say it will be available for foreigners at all?

Apart from that, why would a Chinese business be more or less likely than, say, an American business to look into your data? Or do as you suggest: blackmail you? If they make this available to people outside China, it will be because they want to make business, and you can't run a business that way.

And why would they want to look at anybody's data? I mean, would anybody seriously consider putting highly sensitive business secrets out in a cloud?

I like to dabble in stocks and shares occasionally and would like to jump on the China growth curve. But every time I get anywhere near to deciding a strategy I get cold feet. The main reason being Chinese contracts just seem like Chinese lanterns, so ephemeral. How anything gets done in that country is beyond me - yet we keep seeing these monumental projects. I think it is all smoke and mirrors... and I for one don't know how real any of this Chinese IT stuff is.

The main reason being Chinese contracts just seem like Chinese lanterns, so ephemeral.

I know exactly [telegraph.co.uk] what you mean. But there's a way to deal with risk. Make small investments and don't be greedy. Worst that can happen is you lose your investment - but if it wasn't that much to begin with, who cares. If you go all in though, you are a fool and deserve to be parted from your money.

Software is more important than hardware today. The whole cloud computing movement shows that in many cases hardware is just a cheap commodity. This datacenter is some politicians building themselves a monument and pretending to be ahead or at least on the same level with the west. This is just a lot of hot air, but otherwise quite irrelevant. Building a large datacenter is pretty easy, once you have the cash, and does not show any level of technological sophistication.

So if somebody builds thousands of miles of highways it's not impressive either, since it's just infrastructure? The Chinese have done exactly that and for a fraction of the cost here in the US. Dude, wake up, building facilities like this allows a myriad of services available for business, government, etc.
Judging by your comment about the iPhone, you seem to be either a smartass or in total disconnect of reality. An iPhone represents smartphones as whole and that along cloud computing, is driving most of

You mistake my statement. It is not impressive as an advanced technological feat. It is impressive as a business achievement. What is wrong in the evaluation of this data-center in the press, is that it is interpreted as a sign the builders are at the forefront of technology. It does not signify that at all.

The iPhone is a nice gadget, with almost zero technological value. In fact the current generation is not even a good phone. Its main selling-point is design, not engineering, although Apple tries hard to

Software is more important than hardware today. The whole cloud computing movement shows that in many cases hardware is just a cheap commodity. This datacenter is some politicians building themselves a monument and pretending to be ahead or at least on the same level with the west. This is just a lot of hot air, but otherwise quite irrelevant. Building a large datacenter is pretty easy, once you have the cash, and does not show any level of technological sophistication.

You have ah, interesting, definitions of 'cheap' and 'easy'. Are you, by some chance, in management?

This is a political stunt. It is expensive, but easy to do, which is why the Chinese are doing it. They currently have a lot of money, but money does not come with sophistication. Having a large data-center is nothing special today and does not show that you are on the forefront of any technology.

This is the reason why most people won't hire PhD's for engineering jobs. They have spent way too much time in academia to understand the market. Step down from that position you put yourself into and understand that cloud computing is not about the hardware per se, but the software that can be build on top of it. We are witnessing the promise of a Beowulf cluster and you say that building the largest facility in the planet is irrelevant?

But China's overall level of IT spending, while growing rapidly, is only one-fifth that of the US.

How much does the US spend on software (Which the chinese will get for free) and labour (which is much cheaper in china)?Spending is not an absolute guide, the chinese have significantly lower costs in some areas than the US does.

My buddy is a commercial real estate agent in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park/Sunnyvale (so, Silicon Valley) area, and let me tell you, there's ALOT more than 6 million square feet of office space available to rent. The number may sound impressive, but it's nothing compared to what they have in Northern California alone. I mean, the Oracle campus in Redwood City is over 4 million square feet all by itself.

"The term “cloud computing” is a marketing buzzword with no clear meaning. It is used for a range of different activities whose only common characteristic is that they use the Internet for something beyond transmitting files. Thus, the term is a nexus of confusion. If you base your thinking on it, your thinking will be vague.

When thinking about or responding to a statement someone else has made using this term, the first step is to clarify the topic. Which kind of activity is the statement reall

Let me get this right, we're panicking that China might be taking over us technologically because they're planning to build a humongous data-center using...chips from American companies like IBM, Intel, AMD and Nvidia. Despite being multinational companies, these companies are all headquartered in the US, with a substantial portion of their staff (especially the execs and higher-skilled ones) based in the US.

A Sputnik moment would be if China build a world-class data-center using its own chips, designed and

The data-alien is touching down all over the planet! Oh what fun!
Data and computation and evolutionary principles grow into conscious-like clouds of swirling people posts and product purchases. There really are no countries anymore; just money looking for fine places to grow. Who would have thought that money has a mind of its own? Luckily we humans need our money plants and the data-alien just like we need our laws and list of friends. Oh the poetry of our modern times. There is no east versus west, only

IBM just complaining that China was over taking the US in the computer arms race and that the US would be behind when something is not done right away.I guess, by something needs to be done, they meant that they should build a giant Chinese data center to dwarf anything else in the world. USA! USA! USA!

I have no doubt that IBM's rationale was, hey, if we don't do it, another company will. We may as well get the cash.Of course, China walks away with the unearned know-how.

It would appear that IBM's actual message was "The US would fall behind if a large contract with IBM were not signed right away"...

It's not as though multinational corporations deliver press release warnings out of patriotic sentiment and an undying love of their natal land; but purely as a tactical or strategic measure for advancing their interests.

All of Bletchley Park was less than a thousandth as powerful as the PDA I had 7 years ago (and certainly the one I have now), yet you couldn't host Facebook, or Amazon, or Slashdot, or run a modern climate simulation on any PDA. Can you see why there will always be data centers?

You totally missed the point, by that time we'll need more space, more processing power and more bandwidth. Same reason that from WW2 to today we've always needed data centers. Unless software suddenly stagnates that's not going to happen.

My point was that a growing demand for computing power can be saturated completely. Say, a PDA size device with an optical cable connection can cover the whole demand for computing of the planet for decades to come.

Software can also be a part of it. For example, when a human see a photo of another human, the brain can compute in a fraction of a second if this face is known or not. It is obvious that some sort of an undiscovered yet parallel computing is going on.

I believe 1000 TB is 1 Petabyte, and 1000 Petabytes is 1 Exabyte. With solid state hard drives emerging, the Exabyte data drive could be very useful for day to day processing while I eek out a living selling Hot Dogs on a corner.

I thought that the whole point of "cloud" was to (within the limitations of bandwidth and latency) abstract away the details of location and configuration of the server iron so that the specialist datacenter guys could do their thing as efficiently as possible, and everybody else could be served up idealized abstractions corresponding to their requirements, whether that be idealized VMs that migrate around ugly physical hardware failures, or idealized email hosts that don't involve looking at the dirty deta

What is that supposed to mean? You are talking like an economist! Firstly, you're making something of a dimensionality error by not specifying the time during which this growth is taking place. Secondly, you are not specifying the base in which this growth rate becomes "double-digit". Furthermore, even if the reader can guess your choice of base correctly, it conveys a rather arbitrary piece of information about the growth rate of China. I expect better from a technically-minded person. If it was actually c

Is China not a place that like...has a lot of earthquakes, or not?I thought there was enough earthquakes to not build with too heavy materials or avoid too many sky scrapers....or maybe it wasjust lack of money to do so, until government stepped up....any input would be welcomed.

It's more than a disaster issue: if that city is where a larger part of the cloud computing services are located, it would be a VERY inviting target for a first strike by a single nuclear warhead if general war breaks out between China and the USA. Don't be surprised that the Chinese military puts in a lot of defensive missile positions using the licensed version of the Russian S-300PMU-1 missile so it could even defend this complex even against ICBM attack.

It's more than a disaster issue: if that city is where a larger part of the cloud computing services are located, it would be a VERY inviting target for a first strike by a single nuclear warhead if general war breaks out between China and the USA. Don't be surprised that the Chinese military puts in a lot of defensive missile positions using the licensed version of the Russian S-300PMU-1 missile so it could even defend this complex even against ICBM attack.

Why bother with an expensive missile and nuke warhead? USB drives are cheap. Just sprinkle them around the parking lot. Use Chinese USB drives for the ironic win. Less mess to clean up later.

The current political atmosphere in America is so virulently anti-intellectual that of the relatively small proportion of the population that can even understand the original article, most of them will just scoff at the Chinese and their "pointy-headed academics", step on the gas in their SUVs, and go back to plotting against foodstamp recipients. There are no "Sputnik moments" for a country where the majority of the population actively rejects the foundations of both the physical and biological sciences be

Okay, let's say that I am enemy of organization X which host everything in that big-fat-oversized datacenter, just do something really stupid like [set/fly/throw] a [bomb/explosive/ddos/plane] [in/on/into/over] the datacenter and everything is gone...
What? I hear someone yelling "DR and backups"? Nah!! the bad publicity will make the rest.
The thing is that as bigger the datacenter is, the complex to manage will be and could be easy target because it is OVERSIZED.

Let me point out that, with the deprecation rate we are seeing now for computers, once they finish building it, they'll need to start the upgrade cycle. And keep cycling: over a certain size, maintenance becomes a nightmare.

How many people you need to lift, solely by their arms power, 1 cubic meter of lead?

American companies aren't the only ones selling their know-how to China, obviously. In 2007, high speed rail in China was non-existent. Now they have more miles of high speed track than all of Europe, and by year end they will have more than the rest of the world put together, and be well on the way to designing their own high speed trains based on the tech sold to them by Japan, Germany and France. If you ever want to do more than talk about building a high speed rail network in the US, you know who to cal

HSR had a good start in the United States but was pretty much killed off for strange reasons.

The Red Devil [wikipedia.org], Electroliner [wikipedia.org], and Bullet [wikipedia.org] were on par with anything else available at the time. The Bullet design was used as inspiration for the Japanese HSR. But it seems HSR in the states was continually coming into conflict with automotive traffic, i.e. the Electroliners were forced to reduce their speeds because the distance between crossing gates and the switches that triggered them was too short and the Electro

``China Building City For Cloud Computing'' -- scientific progress, business development etc., vs. ``US To Fire Up Big Offshore Wind Energy Projects'' -- populism towards tree-hugging hippies, and not even cost-effective at that. Guess which action will pay back better in the longer run?

I don't think you really got a representative example of US activities. Rather compare money spent for renewable energy sources (which are a good thing, even if not effective in the short run) with military expenses and oil-related costs.